As the (very) old members of site might recall, I retired to the South of France lo twenty years ago this month. I'll soon be 70. A 24-year-old younger myself moved from France to Califonia in 1978, where I met my wife, had a reasonably successful career in Hollywood and soon became a naturalized US citizen, the greatest country in the world which I had admired since childhood and the Donald Duck comics by Carl Barks.
Being in an existential mood after watching THE MARVELS on Disney+ (why waste so much on so little?), the question sprang into my mind: what is there to admire about the US today?
Do you need me to list all that was once admirable and has now been trashed: your institutions, your colleges, your healthcare system… (even your cinema) I’m not going to draw a list, it's too depressing. The SCOTUS debate today (Trump v Anderson) is just one more ghastly parody of what the US has become compared to what it once was.
Or perhaps it never was … that's another discussion… Was it always a potemkin village? Are we back to the Reconstruction? I cannot, will not, believe it.
From where I am here today in France, I find it hard, impossible, to inspire any young Frenchman or woman to move to America. What is there for them now?
In the end, the only thing that brought a smile to my face this morning was Taylor Swift. She still embodies that very unique flame that is America. Treasure her.
But she is like a polar bear on an ice floe, I fear.